In today's telecommunications market, competition among different operators is fierce. Many telecom operators are trying to expand their services, lower their prices to customers and apply different innovations to provide services in a cost effective manner. However, the costs associated with the design and build of new networks are very high, and upgrading legacy networks can be prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the disruption incurred in maintaining an existing network should be minimized as much as possible.
When considering the physical layer design of new-build telecom local access networks, in general, many factors such as network equipment dimensioning and positioning, cables and ducts routing, and road trenching are taken into account.
A first step in network design is often to dissect an entire exchange into a manageable way (i.e. divide it into a plurality of individual “catchment areas”). FIG. 1 shows a typical example of network catchment areas where customer premises and distribution points are grouped together with a head end equipment called a Fibre Distribution Hub (FDH). A FDH is used to house hardware devices, typically optical splitters, which split the incoming optical signal from an exchange and distribute the signal to an individual Distribution Point (DP). A DP can also be considered as a small catchment area to group the customer premises together, and further distributes the fibre cables to individual customer premises.
Traditionally, the network design is achieved manually based on planners' domain knowledge. The formation of catchment areas is achieved simply by continuing to determine the locations of FDHs manually and to assign the customer premises to the selected FDHs until the FDHs reach the maximum capacity. Due to the size of given networks (typically over a thousand customer premises) with the consideration of many different practical factors such as the connection capacity of each FDH and the maximum allowable distance between a FDH to customer premises, a manual solution may not be cost effective and is often far from optimum. In addition, the network designs are often created under tight time scales and the quality is dependent on the planners' experience.
Whilst it is possible to automate the network design process, several issues tend to hinder the use of existing automated planning systems/methods to achieve an optimal and/or a cost effective design of the catchment areas.
One important issue in many network deployments is the consideration of the time element for each customer with regards to the provision of an effective planning design. Many existing approaches only focus on the locations of the customer premises with the aims of laying the shortest cables or ducts to reach the customer premises. However, if the completion dates of premises are not taken into account, deploying the network infrastructure in advance without being able to minimize the cabling distance and the number of network equipment may not be the best practice.
Often the concept of phased network deployment is used. A set of customer premises is identified in advance roughly based on their completion dates to form an individual catchment area for network deployment. Planners simply group the premises together with similar completion dates which may result in overlapping of catchment areas. Cables running from customer premises to the network equipment in catchment area A may intersect the cables running from premises to the network equipment in catchment area B. The overlapping of catchment areas is considered to be a bad practice due to the maintenance difficulties of tracking the cables for the individual customers. Furthermore, from the network deployment point of view, cables, joint boxes, main and lead-in ducts are very often installed within each catchment area connecting to the head-end equipment of the identified area. Therefore, avoiding overlapping catchment areas is important.
Another area for potential improvement is flexibility. The completion date of each block of customer premises is not necessarily similar to that of adjacent block.
Finally, traditional planning methods, either automated or manual based, are static and inflexible. As a result, conventional approaches are unable to handle the time and space aspects of the customer premises for the network deployment with a lower cabling distance while satisfying the practical constraints.
For example WO2013169200A1 describes a method of placing ducts/cables and devices in a geographical area for fibre networks. First, a set of starting and end nodes are pre-determined. Links representing trenches are then created based on a shortest path algorithm. Once the required topology is generated, work orders will be created and uploaded to a server.
Similarly, WO2010112845A1 describes the design of an access network comprising optical fibre. It provides a very detailed description of physical connections of an optical fibre network. For example, a core network consists of a small number of core nodes to which are connected local exchanges via backhaul network. Each of the local exchanges is connected to a customer premises via an access network. Network resilience is also considered in this application. However, this document does not mention any automation related to produce a cost effective design with the time element of customers.
Technical publications such as [7], [8], [9] discuss network designs, mainly focus on Fibre To The Home (FTTH). However, they do not consider the formation of catchment areas or the completion time for an individual customer premise during the planning process.
An object of the present invention is to provide a process by which different customer premises can be aggregated to form demarcated catchment areas taking account of both the location and desired completion time of the customer premises, and preferably by minimizing the overall distance among each catchment area while considering the practical constraints. The formation of each catchment area may be based on the time and space (i.e. completion building times, locations of customer premises and the maximum capacity of each cluster).
A further object of the present invention is to provide a process which can handle a very large number of customer premises and produce a cost-effective network scheme, preferably enabling implementation of the suggested solution in a practical manner.